From schools to colleges you have been reading about Netscape Navigator as a web browser in the computer course books. But have you ever used Netscape Navigator? Do you know three years ago, the production of Netscape Web browser was stopped? Today we will be exploring what happened with this web browser and also give it a try.

History: Dominance, Acquisition & Shut Down

Netscape Navigator was the biggest competitor of Microsoft Internet Explorer and even dominated in the field of web browsing in the 1990's. Later in the year 1999, Netscape Communications was acquired by web giant AOL. Which was one of the biggest acquisition of the time? Just before the acquisition of Netscape Communications, Netscape had begun laying the foundation of open source web suite under the name Mozilla foundation. At that time AOL played an important role to in the release of first Mozilla based Netscape 6 browser, in the year 2000. Later in 2003, it became an individual foundation.

AOL continued putting it's best efforts for Netscape, but couldn't compete Internet Explorer. Finally, AOL shut down the support for Netscape Navigator and stopped new releases after 2007.

Netscape Further

AOL now recommends to use Mozilla Firefox and Flock web browser. It provides an add on to safely migrate all the configurations, settings, bookmarks etc to these webbrowsers.

Netscape Navigator: Features, Want to try?

If you first try Netscape navigator you won't find any difference between Netscape and Firefox. Visually it looks all the same even the menu and options. The differences or what's special about Netscape Navigator are listed below:

URL Auto corrector:
If you write a wrong URL, before correcting it prompts for the correction and automatically corrects it.

LinkPad:
A place different from bookmarks where you can store links/URLs temporarily for later use.

MiniBrowser:
MiniBrowser Lets you view web pages in the sidebar simultaneously so you can compare two web pages or do works which are fulfilled by the same.

Stop/Reload Button: Well this is trivial but it's a feature of Netscape, the Reload Button Turns into Stop button while opening the page and vice verse for the opened/stopped page.

Well, there are many other, you can discover if you use it for a longer period of time.

Netscape Navigator Downloads

The Latest release before shut down is 9x seriesDownload Netscape 9.0.0.6 For WindowsDownload Netscape 9.0.0.6 For LinuxDownload Netscape 9.0.0.6 For Mac

To download an older version and other languages (German, French, Japanese, Swedish, Italian, English Canada, English UK) visit the Netscape Release Page

If you try Netscape Navigator you would realize that web browsers grow too slow :D It would take many years for Netscape to disappear from text books I guess.
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